RMT Solution?

[Blackweaver]

Well I think from SE's end, if they catch someone spamming people, not only should the account be banned, but the IP address used to access that account be blocked permanently as well. That would go a good way to putting an end to that. Secondly, they should add an invisible mode for everyone else. These spammers are using the player search function to get names to whisper. If we the players can invisible mode ourselves off of the player search function, that would help us too.

[Sove92]

snip

IP bans have been quite worthless for like 10 years and can lead to innocents being locked out (most private customer IPs change based on ISP's DHCP settings), not to mention the practically endless amount of proxies there are. The search invisibility feature could work for a while, after that, they'll simply send their bots in crowded areas and start reading up player names from RAM. Either way, when you put in a countermeasure, the spammers will find another way. For the first month or so, they were spamming shouts, but then, presumably due to STF presence in zones and many players disabling shout channel in cities, they started using /tells and have been doing so ever since, no more shouts.

The best and least headache inducing solution is a /tell filter, where you can restrict who can send you messages (FC, party, linkshells, friends, no one, everyone, same zone). This is pretty much the only countermeasure that cannot be bypassed. This will, however, most likely cause them to spam in shouts and yells again, but that simply means the STF has to patrol the zones and players can easily thwart that method, with the inconvenience of not seeing other shouts and yells either (you're not missing much).